Portrait of a boy as an artist

Kieron Williamson is standing in a busy gallery, explaining Ducks Crossing, a beautiful oil painting in his latest exhibition. "These beech trees go an absolutely gorgeous orangey yellow in the autumn," the artist says of the landscape scene of Norfolk, east England. "The road there is always wet and there's this lovely purple and orange light. It's just phenomenal."

Kieron is wearing shorts and a T-shirt with the word "Goooal!" and has just turned 12. He is a perfectly ordinary boy - he loves being outdoors, playing football and riding his bike fast - but his talent for painting has made his family's life rather extraordinary.

The boy the British tabloids call Mini Monet has just sold out his latest exhibition of 40 paintings, raising more than £400,000 (HK$5.13 million); he is already a millionaire. A mailing list of 10,000 people crave a Williamson and buyers from New Zealand, Indonesia and Germany have visited his exhibition.

I first interviewed Kieron in 2009 when he was a sweetly monosyllabic seven-year-old and the family lived in a cramped two-bed flat overlooking a petrol station in Holt. I met Kieron again in 2011 when proceeds from his painting had enabled him to buy his family a house in a village on the Norfolk Broads, the watery landscape he loves best.

Unfortunately, his growing celebrity led to what his mother, Michelle, jokingly calls "stalkers" turning up at weekends expecting an audience with the boy wonder, so they moved again, to a converted stable in a quieter village.